Review

Review: Teach Sunday School

October 3, 2018 By Annette1 17 Comments

For the past few weeks my son has been testing out a new bible knowledge program. He likes it! 🙂 That’s always a win you know? When you discover a program that works for how you think. Books of the Bible At-a-Glance from Teach Sunday School gives us an overview of each book of the bible. Simply laid out, clear and crisp one page glances at each bible book. Wonderful!

Who is Teach Sunday School?

Teach Sunday School is a company who wants to help parents and teachers have the tools they need to help themselves and their charges understand God’s word better. Bible-at-a-glance is designed to help individuals better understand the theme, purpose and main verses of each bible book. Teach Sunday School has a variety of other programs to help you understand the bible better. Their purpose? To help you teach the bible with joy!

There are things like:

– Print and go lesson plans which are complete curriculums for ages 4-12,
– Bible printables (like mazes, word search, crossword puzzles, and journal prompts for ages 5-18)
– Bible Games (like Jeopardy, Tic-Tac-Toe, Bingo, and Treasure Hunts)
– Seasonal items for Back-t0-school, holidays, and even Summer
– Bible Crafts for ages 4-18
– Christian Skits and Plays for pageants, plays, and puppet shows
– Christian Parenting material for teaching kids morals, defending their faith and so much more.

What do you get with Bible-at-a-glance?

As you can see, with these bible summary sheets, you have a clear bible book name followed by information that is laid out the same for every book of the bible.

Where you can find it, who wrote it and approximately when. You will then learn the famous stories and pivotal bible verses, complete with main ideas.

How did we use it?

I have to admit, it took us a little while to decide how to use Books of the Bible at a glance. This is the schedule my son and I came up with.

After I print each page off, we place it in a binder for ease of use and reference back. Having all the information on one sheet makes it very easy to use. Coming as a PDF means I can print off as many copies as I want if I were using for a Sunday School or adult learning class. Everything is right at my finger tips!

Before starting his copywork on Monday he would take the time to learn the bible book name and where it was located.

The first day he copied out the main verses, taking the time to read them over a few times and think about what they meant so that on Tuesday he was able to work on memorization. Some weeks were easy (like Genesis took him no time at all) but Leviticus he struggled with.

Below you’ll find his copywork for Exodus. He’s been practicing his cursive using these bible lessons.

On Wednesday’s we had a deal… if there were more than four stories all he needed to do was look up half of the stories and then tell me about the stories he found. Narration is a good skill to maintain you know, and doing it from bible lessons like these, all the better eh? 🙂

Thursday was pretty straight forward, learn the major points, be able to explain them. Expand upon them if you can.

Fridays were a review day where he pulled all the information together, being able to tell me everything he had learned.

My Thoughts:

Well laid out, I like it. I like how the information is succinct, easily seen, each page has the same layout, making it easy to teach or work through. My son could do it independently with just checking in once or twice with me.

Son’s thoughts:

I like how it is set up, I know what to expect. I like that it has bible verses for me to memorize and that I can learn all the basic facts about a book of the bible and I can do them over again if I forget something.

My Pastor Hubby’s thoughts:

They didn’t do a bad job. It’s definitely not laid out from a reformed viewpoint, but overall information presented is pretty decent.

Area of struggle

I disliked this being part of the Leviticus study. Setting people up to not want to read one of books of the bible doesn’t seem right in my eyes. My son commented: “Why would learning laws make people not want to read a bible book?”

Teach Sunday School
Books of the Bible At-a-Glance
Faith based, Bible, Summary Cards, Books of the Bible, Christian, Bible Lessons
Current price $9, normally $19!

I urge you to check out this very helpful resource. It’s an excellent way to help you and your students learn God’s word better in a seamless, easy manner.

75 members of the crew had a chance to look at Bible at a Glance,

Social Media Links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SundaySchoolLessons/
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Review: Picta Dicta Natural World

September 11, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Roman Roads Media proudly presents, Picta Dicta Natural World! It has been our absolute pleasure to review this classical Latin program over the past few weeks. Who would have thought learning Latin could be so much fun? Come on, let me tell you all about this flash card based online program.

Who is Roman Roads Media?

Roman Roads Media are people of faith, publishing classical Christian curriculum. They produce high quality product that is accessible, affordable, and flexible for the Christian homeschool community. If Picta Dicta is any indication, their materials are top-notch!

What is Picta Dicta?

An online, mobile if you wish it to be, program that teaches you Latin words. Picta Dicta Natural World focuses on words that you would find in nature. Cats, dogs, various other animals, plants, fruit, veggies and down the road… Arachnids (my son is looking forward to that lesson). Natural world has 256 chapters.

How is a chapter set up?

I’ve only completed the first six chapters to be honest… the lad is I think on 11. I’ll admit we’ve repeated lessons a few times. Chapter one presented an animal with a description with it. Pay attention to the description you will be tested on it! (ask me how I know!) 🙂 You are given the Latin and American English spelling, what it is grammatically, and it’s importance in Roman society.

Subsequent chapters increase the difficulty. All words are introduced and then mild quizzing starts. Can you pick the right word from a list. Can you match English word to Latin? and so forth. Plenty of pictures are included to help. Correction (with correct answer) is just a thumbs up away. The repetition is the key part. The word is always pronounced, sometimes by pressing on the Latin, and sometimes it comes automatically.

Each new chapter clearly spelled out the expectations for that chapter. You will also note that the topic and lesson grouping is clearly delineated at the top of every page. The percent sign I THINK shows how far you are into each lesson. (near as I can figure anyways).

How did we use it?

Originally we started on the laptops. It didn’t take us long though, to move over to the tablets. In the heat, having a tablet in your lap is WAY cooler than having a laptop and WAY more transportable to the great outdoors too! 🙂 We both chose to just leave the tab open in our tablets, making it really easy to log-in and continue our studies. I have to admit, my son is WAY more diligent about doing it than I do. I keep forgetting! The lad though, has his mom to remind him though I never get argument from him about it. YAY!!! That’s a win, you know?

Anyways, each lesson takes no more than 15 minutes to do. I have been slowly working through chapter 1 which has six subsections. The lad is well into chapter two. There are, I believe, 256 chapters in all, so we’ll have a good time yet going through each of them. You could easily go through several chapters a week, but my requirement is three sessions per week, and he can repeat lessons if he wants to. Honestly… I find MYSELF repeating lessons since my old brain just doesn’t remember the Latin as easily. 🙂 But LOOK! I’ve managed to get three stars on two of my lessons!!!!

My son is doing better. I briefly saw his screen the other day and he has some five stars. Kinda goes to figure why he helps me so easily! 🙂

Please note: the technical difficulties I was having was due to not having the tablet on a secure surface, normally the button works really easily. But filming and doing a lesson at the same time didn’t work as well as I would have liked. But don’t you just love my son piping up in the background helping me along? I JUST LOVE IT (well as a teacher, as a student it was a touch bit annoying). 🙂

I tried quite a few times to get a video of my lad working on it, but that was simply an exercise in frustration. The camera had a hard time with not focusing properly, automatically focusing in and out at weird intervals. I am simply not that good of a photographer to problem solve the issue either.

One of the things I appreciate about this mobile Latin course is how much repetition there is and how they try to help you learn the material. For instance, the lesson I was doing tonight was having me spell the Latin. I made some errors, but they would then give me the option of choosing the right word from a list. Then it would repeat the word I missed later on in the review. Giving me three chances all told to get the right word and learn the proper spelling. I messed up asinus more than once! 🙂

Suggestion For Improvement:

My son mentioned that with some of the programs he uses that autocorrect is turned off, he has to spell it correctly without any help at all. He would like this program to do the same. Otherwise “it’s cheating”. 🙂

Small annoyance. There is no such thing as a male cow. Call it a bull or a male cattle beast…..NOT a male cow. PLEASE…for all the farmers out there…change the terminology! 🙂

My Thoughts:

It made me laugh. I was working on my picta dicta (I’m intentionally a couple days behind my son) and they’d say a word and from across the room he’d say “that’s a chicken”, or “that’s a goat”, and so on and so forth. It was a tad bit frustrating but he was having so much fun going faster than me and I let him do it. 🙂 His dad after a while though told him to quit it otherwise how is mom ever going to learn all these words. And then he (dad) stated “lupus” “cervus” GAH!!!!! These guys! 🙂

Picta Dicta Natural World
Roman Roads Media
Elementary age and up
Latin, online, Classical education, classical curriculum, Picta Dicta
Subscription: 14 months, pricing here.

75 Reviewers, click below to visit them. We reviewed

Social Media Links:

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Review: Branch Out World

August 13, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Paddington Bear…. doesn’t that bear just make you smile? Today, for my review, I have a unit study, from Branch Out World, that will help you dig deeper into the world of Paddington Bear and the places he has been. Fly with me from the deep, dark forests of Peru to the city lights of London. Along the way we’ll discover art, architecture, story-telling, language arts and more.

Who is Branch Out World?

Branch Out World is brain child of a homeschooling family located in the United Kingdom. Having a deep love of books, they wanted to share that love with others and to that end have created literature-based unit studies as well as lapbooks. They are geared to be used by the whole family. Their unit studies have a UK link, the lapbooks are more globally oriented.

What do you Get?

I received a 69 page PDF of Paddington Bear, a literature based unit study. It’s connected to the picture book of Paddington Bear.

You could, if you wanted get through all five days, it’s quite doable, or you could spread it over a longer period. 🙂 A weekly schedule is included, explaining the how and what of each day’s planned activities.

In this literature study you will find lapbook elements such as the one below, along with lists showing what supplies you’ll need every day.

A sample day (I’m choosing day three) has the following options to do with your students.

Learn about the artist
Picture study based on page 31 in the picture book
Learn about architectural features. We went to youtube and looked up specific examples online. Later we went for a walk and talked about the different features we learned about in the houses we saw. This was fun to do!
Principles of Design – overlapping… my son declined to do this project, but we did talk about how shadows would be different depending on where the fruit was placed and that helps show depth and placement.
Principles of Design – Emphasis. My son did this project using a huge spider in the foreground. I’ve a picture of it below.

As you can see, lots to do on any given day. Depending on your student this could take 1/2 an hour or a couple of hours. You could easily expand the projects or shorten them down to just the basics.

All the information and lapbook elements are found at the end of the study.

How We Used Paddington Bear:

I offered to get the book for my 13 year old to read and he turned me down flat. We had the option of watching the book being read, but mostly we just sat down and looked through the options for extended learning. He dove right into learning about the Spectacled bear… telling me all about what he learned about them, showing me one of the videos he watched, and showing me on our globe where they live.

He also grabbed onto the idea of learning some architectural terms, and even drew a picture showing emphasis. It was so interesting watching what elements he gravitated toward and knowing that this study would please so many students. You certainly don’t have to do everything in the lesson plan, you can pick what your students are most interested in (or what you deem most important) and learn about the world at large through a great picture book about Paddington. I have to admit to being a bit annoyed with myself, I had a couple of different elements put together and I can’t find them AND I failed to get a picture of them. I only have the picture of this one element….the drawing for emphasis.

My Thoughts:

I have to admit, my son is a bit beyond the Paddington years, so we picked up this review so that I could look at it for those that DO like Paddington. I was impressed. A good variety of activities and interesting topics to look at. Even my non-Paddington son found things of interest. If you are a lover of all things Paddington OR doing a larger unit study on bears and want to have a literary tie in, this book will provide a good way to do that. 🙂

I was browsing through the Picture Book Explorers series and saw the Mousehole Cat. That sounds like a fun book to read and then explore. What one would intrigue you?

Paddington Bear
Branch Out World
Picture Book Explorers series
69 pages, PDF, 5-10 years old.
lit-based unit studies, topic pack, home education resources, homeschool resources

65 members of the Homeschool Review Crew had a chance to utilize this study. Please read our reviews.

Social Media Links:

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Home School in the Woods – WW2

July 31, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

My son wants to learn about the great wars in the coming year, therefore we were very excited to get a chance to review World War II from the selection of Time Travelers in U.S. History series offered by Home School in the Woods. For the past bit, between bouts of readying our guest room and learning other important keeping up a house skills, my son has been watching copious Youtube videos and diving deep into World War II. Come join us in our studies won’t you?

Who is Home School in the Woods?

The Pak family in essence. Taking a dislike of history and finding a way to teach it in a meaningful, delight-filled way. Their goal is to make history fun and interactive. I urge you to check out the entirety of their Time Travelers series, as well as newest release Ancient Rome which completes their Project Passport series.

What do you get?

A WHOLE lot of PDF’s! OH MY! I actually just ordered them printed off for me at my local Staples. For $35 printed, and delivered, I couldn’t beat the time saver, and personal printing costs to me in the middle of a busy season. Just look at the binder full of paper!

I found the materials come in two formats. If you unzip the folder you can open the entire file in HTML format which walks you through all the information start to finish. Or you can follow the same format I did and simply open all the files. Print off exactly what you need, put it all in a binder so it’s all set up and ready to go and then just work your way through it. You do not have to print off everything, some of the files are simply how to use, how to print off etc. I should mention that different colours of paper were called for in the printing instructions. I chose to ignore those colour changes as I didn’t need “Why this colour mom? Can’t we print it in this colour instead?” All white is simply easier in my household. 🙂

It is SO worth looking through the intro files, teacher keys etc. You’ll find a treasure trove of information. In fact one of the pages I really appreciated having was the additional resources page listed in the intro file. Books, movies, audios, music, and websites. Just a phenomenal well done list which will save me OODLES of time (as long as I can find the materials!) 🙂

When I put things in the binder I put the Lesson reading, followed by the project list, then the copy work (for most weeks), and the weekly project. I really appreciated that they build time into the unit study for catch up weeks. Some of the weekly projects are fairly large, so instead of putting them in a page protector I gave them their own files… like the timelime and a later couple of lessons.

This study follows the events from the Close of WW1 and beginnings of the Nazi party through to the end of the war and what happened afterwards. There are almost 100 figures to add to the ten-page timeline.

A Brief Look:

My son and I put together this brief overview for you.

How we used it:

We didn’t work through our WW2 study at a fast pace. Interspersed into our summer are several birthdays, I’ve had a few “under the weather days”, caring for a house that is our own now, and a major heat wave.. speed wasn’t in our purview. Taking our time working through lessons allowed us to more fully discuss ideas and watch videos that went along with the lessons. We’ve been inspired to take a few rabbit trails as well. I love rabbit trails don’t you? They are so much fun!

Taking time to set it all up properly in the beginning was the best thing I could have done. Having the binder ready to go actually made my boy grin. “Look Mom! Look how much I can learn about the war!” My son could work through it independently beyond checking in with me to see what his work load should be.

There are 25 lessons in all. We are looking forward to these upcoming lessons: Pearl Harbour, Hitler’s Fortress, VE day and Iwo Jima and the Atomic bomb. It is SO interesting listening to my boy. “I didn’t know that!” “Mom, did you know ________________”. The questions of “I don’t understand this part, can you help me?” “Can we look this up on youtube? I want to know more.” Those questions a homeschooling parent lives for eh?

I now know FAR MORE about Hitler, his youth, and how he rose to power from a variety of viewpoints then I ever thought I would. 🙂 And think…. come January I’ll get to learn it all over again. This Time Traveler unit study will become the spine of our World War II studies. We’ll diverge now again to pick up speeches and study them, to focus on Canadian men and women of the war, and to throw in a bit more geography, art projects and to follow rabbit trails.

My son’s opinion:

I like it. I am learning so much and I want to know even more. It makes me think of different things I can watch on youtube, and how everything connects. It’s good and I can do most of it on my own, sometimes mom helps though.

My thoughts:

My lad likes it, it’s well laid out. It provides ample opportunity for rabbit trails and discussion. It’s written at a language easily accessed by middle school and above students. It provides an easy spine for when we start our official studies of World War II in January. It will be very easy to adapt it, or perhaps adapt is not the right word, the way it is laid out it will be very easy to add additional materials or extend a lesson further. Together with The War to End all Wars Game, this history study will suit our needs nicely.

World War II
Time Travelers U.S. History Series
Home School in the Woods
PDF and HTML files received.

Also has a CD option. Pricing options here.
History, interactive, hands on
Hands-on history, history studies, best history studies, world history studies, american history studies, history timelines, history curriculum, notebooking pages

Some 90 of us on the crew took a look at a variety of products from Home School in the Woods. I invite you to go read the reviews. Perhaps the next one you come across will be just what you are looking for! I know this review is what we needed in our household.

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Review: Silverdale Press

June 19, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Rhetoric anyone? Do you know how to write a skillful, artistic and persuasive speech? Introducing Persuasive Writing & Classical Rhetoric: Practicing the Habits of Great Writers by Silverdale Press LLC. Learning to think persuasively with great speeches from the past. Come read our review.

You see that boy in my opening image? That would be my son. He’s just about to explain to me what he thinks of John F. Kennedy’s speech about the space program. This time of discussion has been a blessing in our household over the past few weeks. Silverdale Press’s, Persuasive Writing & Classical Rhetoric program has been a boon to our household.

Who is Silverdale Press?

Silverdale Press was founded by Joshua and Jill Hummer. Their aim is to help middle and high school students cultivate knowledge and improve their skill sets. In that quest they aim to teach the ways of great leaders, writers, thinkers, and citizens.

How is the course set up?

I received four PDF’s from Silverdale Press

Rhetoric Answer Book
Rhetoric Lesson Book
Rhetoric Reader
Rhetoric Workbook

The Lesson Book sets out a schedule to follow weekly. There are 36 lessons divided into five sections. Each lesson is designed to be completed in one week. The five sections are introduction, invention, arrangement, style, and conclusion.

Each lesson in the workbook spelled out each of these steps specifically. The lessons include topics such as Stasis theory, emotional appeals, taking notes and developing a reading list. People studied vary from John Locke to John F. Kennedy to E.B. White.

Setting reading goals had my son doing something he normally doesn’t do (though I’ve been trying to encourage for the past two years) but having it as part of a lesson seems to have spurred him on. “Mom, I have a list of books that I want to read though they aren’t the type that Kennedy would read. I want to read “The Hobbit” “Harry Potter” and “Lord of the Rings”. ” Did you catch that? NOT ones that Kennedy would read (see… he remembers!!!!!) AND he came up with a list of books that he wants to read for himself. I totally call that a win!

What books would you put on this list?

There are massive amounts of pages in these ebooks, The lesson book 235, workbook 202, answer book 65, and reader 111. You can choose to print it all off or print off only what you need to. At this point, I’ve been printing the speeches and the review questions only.

Each week finishes off with an essay challenge based on a major point of the speech reviewed. “Give me ______ or give me death”. “We Choose to ________” By the end of the 36 week study you’ll have received lessons in what real writers do, how to pitch your work and handling rejection. The aim is to produce better writers, and writers want to be published. 🙂

How did we use it?

This is a high-school level course and my son is a rising eight grade student. This meant I adapted the program to suit our needs.

The first lesson we broke over two weeks. Taking time to thoroughly discuss the speech we were given. We learned new words, figured out what rhetoric was, and just talked. We talked while feeding our rabbits, and going for a walk, this wasn’t a sit down and think about it lesson…this was an on-going discussion for us. Part of the requirements was to write an 500 word essay. I simply told my lad, write an essay based on the prompt. I’ll write one too and then we’ll talk about each others essays. Admittedly this was HARD for my lad. Coming up with something to write about (even with a prompt) and then figuring out how to write the essay… tough job. I walked him through how I was writing my essay and from that he was able to put something together but wasn’t happy with it and actually wanted to totally rewrite it.

Surgery happened. The essay got put to the wayside. I started to work my way through lesson two, discovering something wonderful. My lad didn’t want me to work through it on my own. He wanted to continue to chat with me. Since he wasn’t allowed (Doctor’s orders) to do school for two weeks I put it on hold. For the past two weeks we’ve been talking about Kennedy’s space speech. All this discussion and coming up with ideas. It’s been a hoot. Could you imagine a world with all self-driven cars?

I’m not requiring an essay from him at this point. We’ve decided that for now, we will just discuss the speeches, we’ll learn new terminology and do the lessons, but mom will write an essay, and the lad will critique and together we’ll make it the best we can. The lad will talk about an idea he has, and the arguments he would use to persuade his audience of its merits. For instance the lesson on Patrick Henry had him discussing with parents the merits of a good video game and how it doesn’t rot your brain.

Our plans are to work our way through each lesson (taking a couple of weeks to do so) over the next year or so.. and then when the lad is in grade 10 we’ll do the course again, this time with an essay requirement being part of it. When we do so, I will make full use of the answer key which provides correct answers and a rubric for the essays.

Our Recommendation:

This highschool level class has been a lot of fun to work through with my seventh grade student. We are far from done, but we are looking forward to our next lessons. My son wanted me to assure parents with grade seven and eight students to not be afraid to get this course. It’s alot of fun to talk about ideas, and to try to figure out ways to make an essay or speech more persuasive. Silverdale Press has produced a stellar program with their Persuasive Writing & Classical Rhetoric class. It’s been very good to be about practicing the habits of great writers. As a parent I liked how they organized all their workbooks and setting out a good way to approach it. It helped me to break down a bit more for my lad. The side benefit is that I am learning as well. This is an excellent course for parents wanting to increase their skills as well.

Persuasive Writing & Classical Rhetoric: Practicing the Habits of Great Writers
Silverdale Press LLC

Ages 14-18
Homeschool High school, homeschool writing curriculum,
Digital, Ebook, PDF
Rhetoric, Persuasive writing, Speech

Homeschool Review Crew Reviews:

The crew reviewed two products from Silverdale Press

Persuasive Writing & Classical Rhetoric: Practicing the Habits of Great Writers – ages 14-18
White House Holidays Unit Studies – ages 5-18

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Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/SilverdalePress/ Tag: @SilverdalePress
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Pinterest:  https://www.pinterest.com/silverdalepress/

Scratch & Draw Enchanted Animals

June 6, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

I have reviewed Scratch and Draw books before, and when Scratch & Draw Enchanted Animals arrived I thought I knew what I was getting. I have to say, I was delighted to be proven wrong.

This Scratch and Draw book is different from any others that I have ever used before. It is. It’s actually a pretty cool book and I just have to tell you about it.

In Scratch & Draw Enchanted Animals you get a book filled with 20 easy to follow designs to make your own beautiful, scratched out art work. Each design comes with a scratch paper of it’s own in colours such as silver, gold, burgundy, and black. The cover of the book promises they are easy to follow and they are!

ME… non-artistic me! I was able to mostly replicate a drawing. Even my artistic lad said “good job mom, you only needed to bring that part out a bit more, and why didn’t you do the ears right?” But otherwise, I apparently did a good job. Easy enough to replicate and if I wanted to, I could have changed it (at least the ear part). I did use a side of the page to play around with different strokes I could make with the tool.

Oh yes, each book comes with it’s own tool. It’s a solid plastic tool with a pointy end and flat broad end. I found that it fit into my hand nicely and did the job smoothly, like holding a pen or pencil in my hand.

I love the variety in the designs and the page colours. They are what is promised “easy-to-follow drawings”. Easy to replicate, easy to change to suit your own creativity, easy to work with (the stylus worked smoothly), and easy to remove for display purposes.

This is just a lovely book for anyone to sit down with to unwind after a busy day, to take along on a trip or to just spend some time being creative with.

Scratch and Draw Enchanted Animals

Marisa Redondo
Rockport
Reviewed for: Quarto
Series: Scratch & Draw

20 designs plus stylus
Adult Coloring, Creative, Art Book

Other Scratch books I’ve reviewed:

Wild Garden.
Hand Lettered Life.

Review: Critical Thinking Detective Book 1

June 4, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Learning to think, and being able to pick up on clues is an important part of growing up. This skill is one taught by The Critical Thinking Co.™ who does an excellent job of developing critical thinking skills. My son most recently practiced these skills using Critical Thinking Detective™ Book 1. I invite you to come read our review.

The goals of The Critical Thinking Co is to help increase the problem solving skills of students so they are better equipped to meet all of life’s challenges. An increased ability to problem solve will improve grades. Rather than using a test and answer approach they apply logic to math, science, reading, writing and history.

The book we used, The Critical Thinking Detective Book 1 contains 12 logic puzzles in the form of detective cases to solve. It is recommended for grades 4-12. My son is 12 years old and therefore fit perfectly within this age range. We received the ebook version which I promptly printed off on our black and white printer. For the most part having the book in black/white worked well, except for one lesson which needed colour (he has not completed the book yet). Having downloaded it to my computer made it really easy for him to just double check the colours there (actually he just called out me .. mom.. who has a green shirt?)

My son did not work on this every day. He recently had surgery and long before the surgery happened I told him he’d have two weeks off of any type of schooling while he recovered from it. By the middle of week two he was needing to have more to do so I had him spend a bit of time working on this review. It surprised him that he got tired after working through two lessons. I did have him write out the answers to a couple of the lessons, but most of the time he just talked it out with me.

Each case consists of a few short paragraphs describing the case, witness statements, and statements from each of the four suspects. All of the statements are true. Illustrations of the suspects are provided in full colour. These illustrations proved useful in determining the guilty party frequently. The combination between visual and verbal clues was an important part of solving the crime. Answers are given in the back of the book along with the reason why.

Son’s Thoughts:

“Some of the clues are misleading. For instance in the football thief it talks about no socks and the only character that you can gather information from in that regards is an innocent character. How can you know if you can’t see their feet?”

“More writing space is needed”, “It would be nice if it were more difficult” “Would be good to have some where you couldn’t trust all of what the suspects say” “I thought it was an okay program.” “I’m not really happy with it, I would rather it be more difficult with more evidence with some true and some not so you need to weigh out the information more and really need to think more.” “I want it be like real detectives having to solve real crimes”.

My Thoughts:

I found it interesting working through the challenges with my lad. What I grabbed my attention was his comment “they are too easy”. Observation told me that they weren’t too easy until we started talking about them. If the lad was working through it all on his own, his initial guesses were sometimes wrong, but as soon as we talked about them, he’d get the correct answer very quickly. Working through with pen and paper, or talking about it made all the difference for him. Having a sounding board was useful for him. I don’t know if this is a learning to think issue, or just how his brain processes information differently. He’s a verbal lad who does well bouncing ideas off of people.

For me personally, some of the cases were challenging for me as an adult, but others were quite easy to figure out. It was a good assortment of challenges.

Read a past review here.

The Critical Thinking Co.™
Critical Thinking Detective™ Book 1
Two options: paperback or ebook
Price $8.99
Received: ebook

32 pages, 12 cases, four suspects, answers in back, all statements true

Critical thinking, logic problems, thinking skills

100 members of the Homeschool Review Crew reviewed the following items:

Understanding Pre-Algebra
Critical Thinking Detective Book 1
Something Fishy at Lake Iwannafisha
Critical Thinking Detective: Vocabulary
Dare to Compare Level 1
Vocabulary Riddles Book 1

I invite you to read our reviews at this link.

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